Exhibition | A Queer History of Fashion
From The Museum at FIT:
A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk
The Museum at FIT, New York, 13 September 2013 — 4 January 2014
Curated by Fred Dennis and Valerie Steele
Man’s three piece silk velvet suit, 1790–1800, France
Museum purchase, 2010.98.1. Photo by Eileen Costa
A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk features approximately 100 ensembles, from 18th-century menswear styles associated with an emerging gay subculture to 21st-century high fashion. This is the first museum exhibition to explore in depth the significant contributions to fashion made by LGBTQ (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer) individuals over the past 300 years.
Exhibition curators Fred Dennis, senior curator of costume, and Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at FIT, spent two years researching and curating the exhibition. They worked with an advisory committee of eminent scholars, including professors George Chauncey (author of Gay New York), Shaun Cole (author of Don We Now Our Gay Apparel), Jonathan Katz (author/curator of Hide and Seek), Peter McNeil (co-editor of The Men’s Fashion Reader), and Vicki Karaminas (co-editor of the forthcoming Queer Style), as well as FIT faculty and fashion professionals.
“This is about honoring the gay and lesbian designers of the past and present,” said Dennis. “By acknowledging their contributions to fashion, we want to encourage people to embrace diversity.”
“We also hope that this exhibition will transform our understanding of fashion history,” added Steele. “For many years, gays and lesbians were hidden from history. By acknowledging the historic influence of gay designers, and by emphasizing the important role that fashion and style have played within the LGBTQ community, we see how central gay culture has been to the creation of modern fashion.”
From Cristobal Balenciaga and Christian Dior to Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, many of the greatest fashion designers of the past century have been gay. Organized in roughly chronological order, the exhibition explores the history of modern fashion through the lens of gay and lesbian life and culture, addressing subjects including androgyny, dandyism, idealizing and transgressive aesthetic styles, and the influence of subcultural and street styles, including drag, leather, and uniforms.
The exhibition will trace how the gay vernacular styles changed after Stonewall, becoming increasingly “butch.” Lesbian style also evolved, moving from the ‘butch-femme’ paradigm toward an androgynous, anti-fashion look, which was, in turn, followed by various diversified styles that often referenced subcultures like punk. The AIDS crisis marks a pivotal mid-point in the exhibition. Clothing by a number of designers who died of AIDS, including Perry Ellis, Halston, and Bill Robinson, will be featured, as will a wide range of activist T-shirts for ACT UP, Queer Nation, the Lesbian and Gay Rights March in Washington and the iconic Read My Lips. Emphasizing that gay rights are human rights, the exhibition concludes with a section on gay wedding fashions as the sartorial expression of the issue of marriage equality.
Exhibition design is by Joel Sanders, well-known architect and author of Stud: The Architecture of Masculinity.
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From Yale UP:
Valerie Steele, ed., A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-0300196702, $50.
From Christian Dior to Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, many of the greatest fashion designers of the past century have been gay. Fashion and style have played an important role within the LGBTQ community, as well, even as early as the 18th century. This provocative book looks at the history of fashion through a queer lens, examining high fashion as a site of gay cultural production and exploring the aesthetic sensibilities and unconventional dress of LGBTQ people, especially since the 1950s, to demonstrate the centrality of gay culture to the creation of modern fashion.
Contributions by some of the world’s most acclaimed scholars of gay history and fashion – including Christopher Breward, Shaun Cole, Vicki Karaminas, Jonathan D. Katz, Peter McNeil, and Elizabeth Wilson – investigate topics such as the context in which key designers’ lives and works form part of a broader ‘gay’ history; the ‘archeology’ of queer attire back to the homosexual underworld of 18th-century Europe; and the influence of LGBTQ subcultural styles from the trouser suits worn by Marlene Dietrich (which inspired Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’) to the iconography of leather. Sumptuous illustrations include both fashion photography and archival imagery.
Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.
Exhibition | Royal Paintbox: Royal Artists Past and Present
Press release from Windsor Castle:
Royal Paintbox: Royal Artists Past and Present
Windsor Castle, 22 June 2013 — 26 January 2014
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For generations, Britain’s kings, queens and their families have been inspired to paint, sketch and sculpt. Accompanying the ITV programme Royal Paintbox, an exhibition of the same name at Windsor Castle this summer charts the history of royal artists from the 17th century to the present day. It includes works by George III and his children, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their children, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra and by Her Majesty The Queen. Also on display are a group of watercolours by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, who plays a leading role in the film. The Prince, who is Chairman of The Royal Collection Trust, has described how his love of painting was inspired by his early years at Windsor Castle surrounded by great art – so it is fitting that the Castle’s Drawings Gallery provides the backdrop for an exhibition dedicated to his family’s work.
The story told in the exhibition, which brings together works from the Royal Collection and from the collection of The Prince of Wales, begins during the aftermath of the English Civil War. Charles I’s nephew, the military leader Prince Rupert of the Rhine, depicted the execution of St John the Baptist in a magnificent mezzotint entitled The Great Executioner (1658). Mezzotint was a new engraving technique which Prince Rupert introduced to Great Britain at the time of the Restoration in 1660. His subject matter may refer obliquely to the execution in 1649 of his uncle Charles I, who is buried in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. During the reign of Charles I’s son and successor Charles II, Prince Rupert was appointed Governor and Constable of Windsor Castle.
George III, Design for a Corinthian Temple for Kew, ca.1759
Pencil, pen and ink and wash (Royal Collection: RCIN 981419)
By contrast, a century later, the work of George III shows the ordered perfection characteristic of the Georgian style. The King’s drawings, which mostly date from the late 1750s, just before his accession in 1760, include a Design for a Corinthian Temple at Kew and a View of Syon House from Kew Gardens.
A familiar scene for visitors to Windsor is captured by George III’s fifth son, Prince Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Aged nine, he painted an accomplished view in gouache of Windsor Town and Castle (1780), presumably under the careful supervision of his art teacher.
George III’s daughters were also tutored in art, and painted and drew throughout their lives. Like The Prince of Wales, the young Princesses were often inspired by the works of art they saw around them. In 1785, George III’s second daughter, Princess Augusta made an etching after a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci from the magnificent group of the artist’s work that entered the Royal Collection during the reign of Charles II. Leonardo’s drawing and the Princess’s etching will be shown side by side in the exhibition. George III’s third daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was particularly creative. One of the rooms at Frogmore House, a favourite royal retreat in Windsor Home Park, is decorated with her floral murals and decorative panels, including intricate cut-paper. Silhouettes and a large floral still life by Princess Elizabeth are included in the exhibition. (more…)
Exhibition | The Nude Male in Art
Press release masculin (1 July 2013) from the Musée d’Orsay:
Masculin / Masculin: L’homme nu dans l’art de 1800 à nos jours
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 24 September 2013 — 2 January 2014
Curated by Ophélie Ferlier, Xavier Rey, Ulrich Pohlmann, and Tobias G. Natter
Pierre et Gilles, Mercury, 2001 © Pierre et Gilles (Courtesy Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris)
Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Desmarais, The Shepherd Paris, 1787 (Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada)
While it has been quite natural for the female nude to be regularly exhibited, the male nude has not been accorded the same treatment. It is highly significant that until the show at the Leopold Museum in Vienna in the autumn of 2012, no exhibition had opted to take a fresh approach, over a long historical perspective, to the representation of the male nude. However, male nudity was for a long time, from the 17th to 19th centuries, the basis of traditional Academic art training and a key element in Western creative art. Therefore when presenting the exhibition Masculine / Masculine, the Musée d’Orsay, drawing on the wealth of its own collections (with several hitherto unknown sculptures) and on other French public collections, aims to take an interpretive, playful, sociological and philosophical approach to exploring all aspects and meanings of the male nude in art. Given that the 19th century took its inspiration from 18th-century classical art and that this influence still resonates today, the Musée d’Orsay is extending its traditional historical range in order to draw a continuous arc of creation through two centuries down to the present day. The exhibition will include the whole range of techniques: painting, sculpture, graphic arts and, of course, photography, which will have an equal place in the exhibition.
To convey the specifically masculine nature of the body, the exhibition, in preference to a dull chronological presentation, takes the visitor on a journey through a succession of thematic focuses, including the aesthetic canons inherited from Antiquity, their reinterpretation in the Neo-Classical, Symbolist and contemporary eras where the hero is increasingly glorified, the Realist fascination for truthful representation of the body, nudity as the body’s natural state, the suffering of the body and the expression of pain, and finally its eroticisation. The aim is to establish a genuine dialogue between different eras in order to reveal how certain artists have been prompted to reinterpret earlier works. In the mid-18th century, Winckelmann examined the legacy of the divine proporzioni of the body inherited from Antiquity, which, in spite of radical challenges, still apply today having mysteriously come down through the history of art as the accepted definition of beauty. From Jacques-Louis David to George Platt-Lynes, LaChapelle and Pierre et Gilles, and including Gustave Moreau, a whole series of connections is revealed, based around issues of power, censorship, modesty, the boundaries of public expectation and changes in social mores.
Winckelmann’s glorification of Greek beauty reveals an implicit carnal desire, relating to men as well as women, which certainly comes down through two centuries from the “Barbus” group and from David’s studio, to David Hockney and the film director James Bidgood. This sensibility also permeates the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as it questions its own identity, as we see in the extraordinary painting École de Platon [School of Plato], inexplicably purchased by the French state in 1912 from the Belgian artist Delville. Similarly, the exhibition will reveal other visual and intellectual relationships through the works of artists as renowned as Georges de La Tour, Pierre Puget, Abilgaard, Paul Flandrin, Bouguereau, Hodler, Schiele, Munch, Picasso, Bacon, Mapplethorpe, Freud and Mueck, while lining up some surprises like the Mexican Angel Zarraga’s Saint Sébastien [Saint Sebastian], De Chirico’s Les Bains mystérieux [Mysterious Baths] and the erotica of Americans Charles Demuth and Paul Cadmus.
This autumn therefore, the Musée d’Orsay will invite the visitor to an exhibition that challenges the continuity of a theme that has always interested artists, through unexpected yet productive confrontations between the various revivals of the nude man in art. The exhibition has been organised by the Musée d’Orsay in collaboration with the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
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The catalogue is published jointly by by the Musée d’Orsay and Flammarion:
Guy Cogeval, Claude Arnaud, Philippe Comar, Damien Delille, Ophélie Ferlier, Ulrich Pohlmann, Xavier Rey, Masculin / Masculin: L’homme nu dans l’art de 1800 à nos jours (Paris: Musée d’Orsay / Flammarion, 2013), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-2081310094, 40€.
Masculin/Masculin montre combien les professions de foi esthétiques, dogmes et prises de position plastiques du XIXe siècle en matière de nudité masculine puisent leurs origines au classicisme du XVIIIe siècle et demeurent encore présents aujourd’hui. Les oeuvres y sont envisagées sous l’angle de l’histoire sociale et culturelle, ou des enjeux de politique actuelle concernant la redéfinition de la perception du corps, la permissivité dans sa représentation et son usage, son pouvoir et son intimité, ou encore du rapport entre les sexes et de l’évolution de la masculinité.
Véritable dialogue entre peintures, sculptures, arts graphiques et photographies, le catalogue tisse des liens entre les époques grâce à d’inattendues et fécondes confrontations, les oeuvres contemporaines apportant un éclairage nouveau sur les siècles précédents. L’éclectisme revendiqué dans le choix des oeuvres, sans pour autant occulter les représentations les plus douloureuses de l’homme nu, aboutit à une célébration de la beauté qui ne dissimule pas sa joie et à un plaisir trop longtemps passé sous silence alors même qu’il est indissociable du genre. L’originalité n’est donc pas recherchée pour elle-même, mais davantage érigée en sésame ouvrant à un renouvellement du regard porté sur des oeuvres parfois extrêmement célèbres, visant à bousculer des lectures et à créer des correspondances.
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Note (added 12 October 2013) — Doreen Carvajal, “With Money Tight, Museums Embrace Nudes,” The New York Times (11 October 2013).
. . . the crowds are coming [to the Musée d’Orsay], averaging more than 4,500 people a day, triple the amount for a show at the same time last year, according to museum figures. The exhibition — which includes works by Picasso and Edvard Munch as well as more contemporary nudes by David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe — has provoked a wide range of responses inside and outside France. “A confused show” the French daily newspaper Le Monde weighed in, “devoid of any historical reflection.” But the show still was the buzz of Paris Fashion Week. And Marie Claire, a women’s beauty magazine, anointed it the “hottest event” of autumn. And sizzle is what a number of major European institutions seek this fall, hoping that a focus on sex will entice visitors and broaden their appeal to younger generations and a demographic who are more likely to read Marie Claire than Le Monde. . .
The full article is available here»
Exhibition | Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World
Press release (3 September 2013) from The Morgan:
Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 27 September 2013 — 5 January 2014
Organized by William M. Griswold and Jennifer Tonkovich
Giambattista Tiepolo, Psyche Transported to Olympus, pen and brown ink, brown wash, over black chalk (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, photo by Graham S. Haber)
The eighteenth century witnessed Venice’s second Golden Age. Although the city was no longer a major political power, it reemerged as an artistic capital, with such gifted artists as Giambattista Tiepolo, his son Domenico, Canaletto, and members of the Guardi family executing important commissions from the church, nobility, and bourgeoisie, while catering to foreign travelers and bringing their talents to other Italian cities and even north of the Alps. Drawn entirely from the Morgan’s collection of eighteenth-century Venetian drawings—one of the world’s finest—Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World chronicles the vitality and originality of an incredibly vibrant period. The exhibition will be on view from September 27, 2013 to January 5, 2014.
“In the eighteenth century, as the illustrious history of the thousand-year-old Venetian Republic was coming to a close, the city was favored with an array of talent that left a lasting mark on western art,” said William M. Griswold, director of the Morgan Library & Museum and principal curator of the exhibition. “The names Tiepolo, Canaletto, and Guardi are almost synonymous with the time and place, and their paintings and frescoes are the works most commonly associated with the Settecento in Venice. But their greatness as painters is only part of a much larger story. The drawings in this exhibition, chosen entirely from the Morgan’s collection, bring to light the full spirit of eighteenth-century Venetian art and the many extraordinary individuals who participated in the resurgence of cultural activity that characterized the final years of the Republic.”
The Morgan has more than two hundred sheets by Giambattista Tiepolo, spanning his long and immensely successful career. Over thirty are on view in the exhibition, including a monumental early drawing of Hercules, dozens of luminous studies in pen and washthe frescoed ceilings for which Tiepolo was most famouand a late study for an overdoor decoration that he created in Madrid, where he lived and worked from 1762 until his death in 1770.
Many of Tiepolo’s most beautiful drawings relate to the vast fresco depicting Apollo accompanied by other deities and the Four Continents, which the artist painted in 1740 on a ceiling in the Palazzo Clerici, Milan. Several works in the show, such as a drawing of Father Time and Cupid, relate directly to the finished fresco. A number of others were ultimately rejected by Tiepolo, or instead relate to the spectacular oil sketch for the Palazzo Clerici ceiling that now belongs to the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth.
Giambattista Tiepolo, The Virgin and Child Seated on a Globe, pen and brown ink, brown and ochre wash, over black chalk
(New York: The Morgan Library & Museum)
A highlight of the exhibition is Tiepolo’s remarkable drawing The Virgin and Child Seated on a Globe, which like a number of other sheets on view formerly belonged to an album of exceptionally large, finished studies once in the collection of Prince Alexis Orloff. The sheet may be a rare example of the artist’s designs for metalwork, in this case perhaps a processional mace for the Scuola Grande dei Carmini, Venice.
Giovanni Battista Piazzetta was a half a generation older than Giambattista Tiepolo, and he exercised a profound influence on the work of the younger artist. The exhibition includes nine of the Morgan’s more than two hundred drawings by Piazzetta, including figure studies, drawings of ideal heads made for sale to collectors, and a selection of sheets that relate to the artist’s work as a designer of book illustrations.
Sebastiano Ricci played a crucial role in reorienting Venetian painting toward a new, painterly grand manner inspired by such earlier masters as Paolo Veronese. Ricci’s paintings, distinguished by their bright colors and flickering brush work, were a source of inspiration for later eighteenth-century Venetian artists. In addition to two drawings by him, the exhibition also features five sheets by Sebastiano’s nephew and pupil Marco Ricci. Best known for his imaginary landscapes, the younger Ricci’s drawings reflect diverse influences, including Renaissance and later Italian painters and printmakers, and even seventeenth-century Dutch art.
View painting—or vedutismo—flourished in eighteenth-century Venice, and both local collectors and foreign grand tourists eagerly sought images that replicated or merely evoked the unique topography of the city. Such topographical views and architectural capricci inspired by Venice’s architecture, canals, and lagoon were the specialty of Canaletto, who is represented in the exhibition with five drawings. These range from sketches made on the spot to finished works intended for sale. Francesco Guardi similarly excelled in depictions of Venice and nearby locations. Two of his drawings on view depict the richly decorated bucintoro, the state barge on which the doge journeyed each year on Ascension Day to reenact Venice’s symbolic marriage to the sea. Guardi’s drawing of Count Giovanni Zambeccari’s balloon ascent—launched from a platform in the Bacino di San Marco in 1783—is a faithful record of an event, whereas other works by the artist mingle the real with the imaginary.
The Morgan is one of the world’s principal repositories of drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an artist whose spirited work reflects a variety of influences, from late Baroque stage design to the monuments of ancient Rome. Although few of his surviving drawings were made in his native Venice, the Morgan has a small group, of which a selection is on display. These include a magnificent, large sketch of a gondola, several designs for the interior decoration of Venetian palaces, and one of a very small number of freely drawn figural compositions that apparently date to the first years of the artist’s career.
The last truly great Venetian artist of the period was Domenico Tiepolo, who lived until the first decade of the nineteenth century and saw the collapse of the Venetian Republic in 1797. In 1740 Domenico entered his father Giambattista’s busy workshop, where he rapidly became a key member. The influence of his father was profound, and many drawings by the younger Tiepolo relate to those of Giambattista, but Domenico’s tremulous pen work and layering of wash set his work apart from that of the older artist.
Between 1786 and 1790, Domenico Tiepolo executed a series of more than three hundred New Testament scenes. Six of the Morgan’s twenty-three sheets from the series are on display, including a moving Christ on the Mount of Olives, Saints Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate, and The Holy Family Arrives at the Robbers’ Farm, an unusual subject derived from the Apocrypha.
In another series of about eighty large drawings the artist depicted scenes of Venetian life during the final years of the Republic. The six drawings from the series in the exhibition wittily describe the foibles and excesses of the artist’s contemporaries from all walks of life, including a quack dentist, a storyteller, a bride-to-be with her prospective mother-in-law, and bewigged magistrates.
Toward the very end of his life Domenico Tiepolo undertook one last, important series of drawings: theatrical vignettes chronicling birth, childhood, youthful advenmiddle age, illness, death, and resurrection of the Commedia dell’Arte character Punchinello. Begun in 1797, the year the last doge stepped aside and the thousand-yold Republic of Venice ceased to exist, these drawings are among the greatest achievements of eighteenth-century Venetian art.
In addition, Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World presents drawings by some of the many lesser-known artists who worked alongside Sebastiano Ricci, Piazzetta, and Giambattista Tiepolo. These include Gaspare Diziani, Franceso Fontebasso, Mattia Bortoloni, Pietro Longhi, Pietro Antonio Novelli, Francesco Tironi, and Giacomo Guardi, whose postcard-like Venetian views in gouache on paper mark the end of a long, glorious tradition.
G A L L E R Y T A L K S
Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings
Friday, October 18, 6:30 pm
An informal exhibition tour with Edward Payne, Moore Curatorial Fellow in the Morgan’s Department of Drawings and Prints. Free with museum admission
Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings
Friday, November 8, 6:30 pm
William M. Griswold, Director of the Morgan, will lead an informal tour of the exhibition. Free with museum admission
Exhibition | American Adversaries: West and Copley
Press release (19 June 2013) from the MFAH:
American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World
Museum of Fine Art, Houston, 6 October 2013 — 5 January 2014
This October, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World, an extensive exhibition charting the rise and spectacular success of contemporary history painting in the 18th century through the lives and experiences of two colonial American innovators: Benjamin West (1738–1820) and John Singleton Copley (1738–1815). West and Copley—initially friends and eventually bitter rivals—gained phenomenal fame from their theatrical paintings that romanticized current events and captured the imaginations of the art-viewing public. American Adversaries is on view from October 6, 2013, to January 20, 2014.
American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World traces the ambitious, competitive and highly successful lives of West and Copley through oil paintings, works on paper, sculptures and artifacts. At the core of the exhibition are two paintings that catapulted West and Copley into international fame: West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1770; 1779 version) and Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778). The paintings have not been presented together in more than 60 years and never before in this context.
“This is a remarkable opportunity for Museum visitors to see in the same exhibition these two iconic paintings in the history of art, The Death of General Wolfe and Watson and the Shark,” said MFAH director Gary Tinterow. “Painted nearly 250 years ago and considered strikingly modern in their day, the issues addressed with such dramatic flair have the power to still resonate with viewers today.”
“Long before Jackson Pollock drew international acclaim for his innovative Abstract Expressionist paintings in the mid-twentieth century, West and Copley held center stage in the international art world of the 18th century centered in London,” said Emily Ballew Neff, MFAH curator of American painting and sculpture. “The exhibition addresses how it is that these two colonial artists on the margins of empire come to have such phenomenal success.”
Both born in the same year (1738) in the American Colonies of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of international fame and fortune. London, the cultural and political capital of the empire, attracted and swayed both artists to stay to develop their careers as history painters and neither returned home to America.
West and Copley established a new genre of painting known as contemporary history painting with The Death of General Wolfe and Watson and the Shark. These dramatic large-scale canvases featured compositional elements derived from antique and Old Master sources, yet instead of portraying biblical, mythological or literary heroes, they depicted real people from contemporary life. This exhibition examines these paintings and the period in which they were painted to animate a past that is unfamiliar to many today. It restores the dynamism and modernity of this particular artistic moment as it happened, rather than through the lens of what we later have come to know. These works point to a world informed by the powerful agency of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy in the Great Lakes region; the scientific and imperial exploration of the seas; the rising role of the media and its relationship to history painting; and the stagecraft involved in managing the perception of a successful artistic career in 18th-century London. In the exhibition, the two key paintings are joined by works of art from all over the Atlantic World, which give them greater context and meaning.
A fully illustrated catalogue, published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, distributed by Yale University Press and designed by Studio Blue, accompanies the exhibition and features essays by international scholars. The catalogue for this exhibition receives generous funding from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. An indemnity has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The exhibition is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
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38th Annual Ruth K. Shartle Symposium
American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World
Museum of Fine Art, Houston, 5 October 2013
This one-day symposium includes talks by prominent scholars addressing themes developed in the exhibition. Following the symposium, guests are invited to a reception and a viewing of the exhibition. More information is forthcoming. Visit www.mfah.org/calendar for updates.
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From Yale UP:
Emily Ballew Neff with Kaylin H. Weber, American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0300196467, $75.
American artists and innovators Benjamin West (1738–1820) and John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) changed the way history was recorded in the 18th century and became America’s first transatlantic art superstars. Initially friends but eventually bitter rivals, the artists painted contemporary events as they happened, illustrating the transformation of imperial power through diplomacy between British Americans and the Iroquois, and through transatlantic trade, exploration, and the natural history of the West Indies.
Focusing on two iconic works, West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1770) and Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778), American Adversaries charts the rise of contemporary history painting, and offers a compelling examination of American history and New World exploration. Featuring more than two hundred color reproductions of paintings, works on paper, and objects that informed the artists, this handsome volume also includes essays that shed new light on, among other subjects, West and Copley within the context of the Royal Academy and the use of Western and Native American objects in cultural diplomacy.
Emily Ballew Neff is curator of American painting and sculpture, and Kaylin H. Weber is assistant curator of American painting and sculpture, both at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Display | Ben Okri on Ayuba Suleiman Diallo
From the NPG:
Ben Okri on Ayuba Suleiman Diallo: A Dialogue Across Time
National Portrait Gallery, London, 20 September 2013 — 16 March 2014
William Hoare, Portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Job ben Solomon), 1733 (NPG L245, Lent by Qatar Museums Authority/Orientalist Museum, Doha, 2010)
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was an educated man from a family of Muslim clerics in West Africa. In 1731 he was taken into slavery and sent to work on a plantation in America. By his own enterprise, and assisted by a series of spectacular strokes of fortune, Diallo arrived in London in 1733. Recognised as a deeply pious and educated man, in England Diallo mixed with high and intellectual society, was introduced at Court and was bought out of slavery by public subscription. Through the publication of his Memoirs in 1734, Diallo had an important and lasting impact on Britain’s understanding of West African culture, black identity and Islam. In the early years of the nineteenth-century, advocates of the abolition of slavery would cite Diallo as a key figure in asserting the moral rights and humanity of black people.
Booker-prize winning Ben Okri is one of Britain’s finest writers. Fascinated with the enigmatic story of Diallo, and his relevance today, Okri embarked on a series of conversations to explore the painting and its impact with audiences at the National Portrait Gallery and its regional partners in Liverpool, South Shields and Leicester. Okri’s new poem, which is part of the display, is inspired by this journey of discovery into the moving and sometimes uncomfortable story of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and a portrait which raises many questions.
The tour and display has been made possible by the generosity of Thomson Reuters, the Qatar Museums Authority and individual Gallery supporters. The display and its interpretation is complemented by a series of talks and events funded by the American Friends of the National Portrait Gallery, including a conversation between Ben Okri and Gus Casely-Hayford.
New Book | Turner and the Sea
The exhibition opens at the National Maritime Museum in November; proposals for the related conference are due by September 6.
Christine Riding and Richard Johns, Turner and the Sea (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0500239056, $60.
This is the first publication to focus on J. M. W. Turner’s lifelong fascination with the sea, from his Royal Academy debut in 1796, Fishermen at Sea, to his iconic maritime subjects of the 1830s and 1840s such as Staffa, Fingal’s Cave. It places Turner and his work firmly in the broader field of maritime painting that flourished in nineteenth-century Britain, France, Germany, Holland, and America.
The majority of the works illustrated here—paintings, watercolors, sketches, sketchbooks, and engravings—are by Turner, but there are also comparative works by some forty other artists including Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, John Constable, Benjamin West, and Gustave Courbet. The book is organized thematically and chronologically, and the subjects range from “Contested Waters,” which examines what was at stake for marine painting during the Napoleonic Wars, to “New Wave,” an exploration of Turner’s international and often surprising legacy for the art of the sea.
Christine Riding is senior curator of paintings and head of the arts department at the National Maritime Museum. Richard Johns is curator of prints and drawings at the National Maritime Museum.
Exhibition | Splendore a Venezia: Art and Music
Press release (6 June 2013) from the MMFA:
Splendore a Venezia: Art and Music from the Renaisance to Baroque in the Serenissima
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 October 2013 — 19 January 2014
Portland Art Museum, 15 February — 11 May 2014
Curated by Hilliard T. Goldfarb
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Minuet (detail), 1756 (Barcelona: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya)
This fall the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will present an innovative interdisciplinary exhibition, exploring for the first time the important interrelationships between the visual arts and music in the Venetian Republic, from the early sixteenth century to the fall of the Serenissima at the close of the eighteenth century, a period during which these art forms served the political ambitions of the state and civic institutions and became increasingly central to the economy of the Republic.
Thanks to outstanding loans from prestigious museums and collectors, visitors to the exhibition Splendore a Venezia: Art and Music from the Renaissance to Baroque in the Serenissima will discover the splendours of Venice through the musical scene: salons, the elaborate carnevale, the theatre, street performances and the festive, costumed commedia dell’arte.
Featuring approximately 120 paintings, prints and drawings, as well as historical instruments, musical manuscripts and texts, Splendore a Venezia paints a portrait of extraordinary artistic and musical creativity. This exhibition organized by the Museum brings together masterworks by many of the most renowned names associated with the city on the lagoon: visual artists directly associated with the musical life of the city include Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano, Giovanni Battista and Domenico Tiepolo, and Francesco Guardi, many of whom were also amateur musicians, as well as Bernardo Strozzi, Pietro Longhi and Canaletto, whose paintings record the role of music in Venetian life. The exhibition also includes manuscripts and publications by Venetian composers like the Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Albinoni, Lotti and Vivaldi.
Nathalie Bondil, Director and Chief Curator of the MMFA, said, “In keeping with the original exhibition programming we began with Warhol Live, Imagine, Miles Davis and Lyonel Feininger, music takes its place front and centre with this new MMFA production. As D’Annunzio said: “In Venice, in the same way that one cannot feel except in music, one cannot think if not in images.” That’s how it is at the MMFA, too: it is impossible to see without listening or to listen without seeing.” In a presentation that resembles the Museum’s previous multidisciplinary exhibitions, Splendore a Venezia will give visitors an opportunity to enjoy musical accompaniment related to each theme in the galleries, thus enhancing the exploration of each of these works.
Exhibition curator Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Associate Chief Curator and Curator of Old Masters at the MMFA and a specialist of the Italian Renaissance, developed the concept of this original exhibition produced by the MMFA, by gaining inspiration from an idea put forward by the Musée de la musique in Paris. This exhibition will be circulated by the MMFA to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon from March 7 to June 8, 2014. The exhibition’s musical accompaniment is being overseen by musicologist François Filiatrault.
The works, on loan from prominent international collections like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, the New York Public Library, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington), the Palatine Gallery, Uffizi, Capitoline, Cini Foundation, Accademia, Museo Correr, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the National Gallery (London) and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and the Cité de la musique in Paris, among others. Extensive associated programming includes a series of concerts with period instruments in the MMFA’s Bourgie Hall, as well as related activities throughout the city.
The visual arts and musical scenes during the extraordinarily creative period from Titian to Guardi and Willaert to Vivaldi were profoundly interconnected. The world’s first public opera house (1639) opened in Venice, which boasted no fewer than nine commercial opera houses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Modern music typography was invented in Venice, and it was there that the most important musical presses in Europe were located. Public musical concerts were crucial to the economic strength of Venice’s scuole (rich, powerful brotherhoods) and ospedali (establishments for the poor and orphans). Each year, a variety of processions were held in celebration of special occasions. These were recorded in the visual arts and celebrated in music, in turn serving its government, which sponsored the arts. Music and the visual arts also became central to state propaganda and the Republic’s state receptions and international profile.
The exhibition is organized along three broad conceptual themes reflecting specific, parallel and interrelated characteristics of art and music during this critical period of Venetian history: 1) Art and Music in the Public Sphere 2) Art and Music in the Private Realm 3) Art, Music and Mythology [more information about each theme is available in the press release]
To accompany the exhibition, the MMFA’s Publishing Department is co-publishing a full-colour exhibition catalogue, in English and French editions, with Hazan, Paris [Art and Music in Venice: From the Renaissance to Baroque]. The catalogue features essays by leading international experts in Venetian art, culture and music, under the general editorship of Dr. Hilliard T. Goldfarb. He is joined by a distinguished team of international cultural and musicological experts, including Tiziana Bottecchia, Dawson Carr, Francesca del Torre, Joël Dugot, Iain Fenlon, Caroline Giron, Jonathan Glixon, Sergio Guarino, Eugene Johnson, Piero Lucchi and Ellen Rosand. This publication will serve as a reference work that will make an ongoing contribution to the body of knowledge on music and the visual arts in the private and public realms of the Venetian Republic. It will be distributed internationally by Hazan (French edition) and Yale University Press (English edition). (more…)
Exhibition | Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800
As noted at Style Court, Interwoven Globe opens this month at The Met; from the press release:
Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 16 September 2013 — 5 January 2014
Curated by Amelia Peck
Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade is the first major exhibition to explore the international transmittal of design from the 16th to the early 19th century through the medium of textiles. It highlights an important design story that has never before been told from a truly global perspective. Beginning in the 16th century, the golden age of European maritime navigation in search of spice routes to the east brought about the flowering of an abundant textile trade, causing a breathtaking variety of textiles in a multiplicity of designs and techniques to travel across the globe. Textiles, which often acted as currency for spices and other goods, made their way from India and Asia to Europe, between India and Asia and Southeast Asia, from Europe to the east, and eventually to the west to North and South America. Trade textiles blended the designs, skills, and tastes of the cultures that produced them, resulting in objects both intrinsically beautiful and historically fascinating.
The exhibition is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund, The Coby Foundation, Ltd., The Favrot Fund, the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, and the Quinque Foundation.
While previous studies have focused on this story from the viewpoint of trade, Interwoven Globe is the first exhibition to explore it as a history of design—and to approach it from a perspective that emphasizes the beauty and sophistication of these often overlooked objects. It will explore the interrelationship of textiles, commerce, and taste from the Age of Discovery to the 19th century. From India and its renowned, ancient mastery of painted and dyed cotton to the sumptuous silks of China and Japan, Turkey and Iran, the paths of influence are traced westward to Europe and the Americas. Shaped by an emerging worldwide visual culture, the resulting fashion for the “exotic” in textiles, as well as in other goods and art forms, gave rise to what can be recognized as the first truly global style.
Interwoven Globe will feature 134 works, about two-thirds of which are drawn from the Metropolitan Museum’s own rich, encyclopedic collection. These objects will be augmented by important domestic and international loans in order to make worldwide visual connections. Works from the Metropolitan will come from the following departments: American Decorative Arts, Asian Art, Islamic Art, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Costume Institute, European Paintings, Drawings and Prints, and Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. They will include numerous flat textiles (lengths of fabric, curtains, wall hangings, bedcovers,) tapestries, costumes, church vestments, pieces of seating furniture, and paintings and drawings. (more…)
Exhibition | Eighteenth-Century Pastels
Now on view at The Met:
Eighteenth-Century Pastels
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2 August — 29 December 2013
Benedetto Luti, Study of a Boy in a Blue Jacket, 1717. Pastel and chalk on blue laid paper, laid down on paste paper (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
With the 1929 bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, the Metropolitan Museum acquired its first pastels—about twenty nineteenth-century works by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and Édouard Manet. For forty years, they were shown with our European and American paintings. It was not until 1956 that we were bequeathed a pastel by Jean Pillement (1728–1808). Between 1961 and 1975 we acquired a small group of works by John Russell (1745–1806), and there the matter stood until 2002, when the Metropolitan bought a pastel by the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757). Since then we have purchased nearly a dozen others by Italian, French, British, German, and Danish artists. Most are portraits, exhibited here with two vivid seascapes by Pillement from a private collection. Pastels are made from powdery substances that are fragile and subject to fading. In accordance with modern museum practice, they are exhibited in very low light or rotated to ensure their long-term preservation. This display is therefore a temporary extension of the new installation in the adjoining galleries for European Old Master paintings.
Described by the great Salon critic and encyclopedist Dennis Diderot as no more than dust, pastel owes it distinctive velvety quality to its powdery surface, which reflects diffuse scattered light. Consisting of finely ground pigment and a white mineral extender moistened with a minute quantity of binder (such as oatmeal whey, mineral spirits, and gum tragacanth) rolled into sticks of color, pastels are made in a progression of tints and shades. Pastelists kept hundreds of such crayons on hand. The popularity of pastel—especially for portraiture—swept across Europe and Britain in the eighteenth century. Unlike today, such compositions were regarded as paintings. They were executed in vibrant colors on paper mounted on a wood strainer, elaborately framed with costly glass and on an intimate scale that suited the refined living spaces of the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie. These works have retained their original brilliance because the pastel medium does not contain resins and the surfaces of works in pastel were never varnished and rarely fixed, thereby precluding the darkening or yellowing that so often alters the hues of paintings in oil.
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